José García Villa (1908 - 1997)

main page | 20th century authors | Filipino-American literature

San Juan, E. "From Jose Garcia Villa to Amado V. Hernandez," in Toward a People's Literature. Can be read, in part, at Google Books.

Tabios, Eileen. A review of The Anchored Angel by Jose Garcia Villa, edited by Eileen Tabios (Kaya: 1999). "Villa's disturbing poetry often seems torn between a 16th century mystical lyricism, and a violent modernism that does not shrink from tearing apart syntax, obsessing on commas, and creating word 'collages' from fragments of poetry and prose by other writers," writes reviewer Jean Vengua Gier. Pacific Reader Literary Supplement (1999).

Tabios, Eileen. Remarks by Eileen Tabios, editor of The Anchored Angel on accepting the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Literary National Award: "The Anchored Angel is a "historical recovery project" -- a book which seeks to recover the works of a poet whose writings undeservedly have lapsed into obscurity, a book which I had envisioned as drawing open the curtain to a stage from which this forgotten poet may begin once more to sing his songs. Jose Garcia Villa was not only a most significant influence on what was a developing English-language literature in the Philippines earlier in the 20th century, but he also was a leading modernist American poet."

Yu, Timothy. "'The hand of a Chinese master': Jose Garcia Villa and modernist orientalism," "Villa's prominent friends and champions--Moore, Edith Sitwell, E. E. Cummings, Mark Van Doren--considered Villa a significant writer, and his work was widely anthologized in collections of modern American poetry of the 1940s and 1950s." The article discusses the reasons for Villa's subsequent displacement from the U.S. literary canon. MELUS, Spring, 2004 (updated link)

The papers and a collection of the works of Jose Garcia Villa have recently been acquired by Harvard University's Houghton Library. An image of the first edition of Villa’s first collection of stories, Footnote to Youth, published in 1933, and information about viewing the Villa collection at Houghton.

The Critical Villa: Essays in Literary Criticism, by Jose Garcia Villa, compiled by Jonathan Chua. (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002). Preview at Google Books.

An overview of the career and writings of Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa from pinoylit.

José García Villa's works include Philippine Short Stories, best 25 stories of 1928 (1929); Footnote to Youth, short stories (1933); Many Voices, poems (1939); Poems (1941); Have Come Am Here, poems (1941); Selected Poems and New (1942); A Doveglion Book of Philippine Poetry (1962); The Anchored Angel (1999)

main page | 20th century authors | Filipino-American literature

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